21 September 2006 Edition

Experience is a good teacher. If we have learned anything over the course of recent attempts to restore the political institutions of the Good Friday Agreement, it is that the DUP do not voluntarily participate in power sharing. Not only will they refuse to move forward on the basis of inclusivity but, if permitted, would reinstate the old unionist hegemony of the pre-1970s. Many unionists, it would appear, voted for this regressive and failed politics when they voted for the DUP. Paisley may be old, some might even think he is beautiful, but he cannot hold back or indeed turn back the tide of history. Free article

A report into the collapse of the proposed West Belfast Springvale Campus initiative, once earmarked as a flagship development project by both the American and British Governments, is being stalled by the NIO's Department for Employment and Learning. Free article

While most people are aware of the all-Ireland architecture of the Good Friday Agreement and its provisions for inclusive power-sharing arrangements in the North, they may be less familiar with the significance of the human rights and equality legislation achieved in its negotiation. Here, SEÁN OLIVER, Sinn Féin's All-Ireland Co-ordinator, argues that these achievements can only be made effective when people demand their rights and use the legislation that is there. Free article

Protection of services and social Europe is not guaranteed, One million EU citizens call for Strasbourg to be ditched, Ministers fail to agree on CIA camps, Persson ousted in Swedish elections and Persson retires Free article

Garrett FitzGerald at 80 still maintains the air of a slightly befuddled academic who looks on his past career with the detachment of a historian. But this is just as much an act as it always was when he was a 'player'. FitzGerald is a dyed-in-the-wool Fine Gaeler for whom antipathy to Irish republicanism has been a prime motivating factor. He was unable to conceal this fact in his interview with Martin Mansergh which focused on the Six Counties. Free article

What makes a story newsworthy is to some extent a matter of personal taste and mood, but the extent to which the major media agree with each other on what constitutes newsworthiness is clearly not just coincidental: it reflects the prejudices and the political interests of those who own the media concerns. Free article

The All Ireland football championship of 2006 ended in the manner that T.S. Eliot envisaged the end of the world. "Not with a bang but a whimper" - appropriately enough from his poem entitled The Hollow Men. Free article